Beamsley is a small village, located 5 miles to the east of Skipton. Harry Speight mentions the ‘Moses’ Rock’ spring at Beamsley as a foot note in his book Upper Wharfedale (Speight, 1900) …
“Happy is Beamsley, too, in its liquid refreshment, for no purer spring is to be found through all England, and so copious is the supply that in the driest season it has never known to fail. The good folk respect their precious spring and call the place from which it issues “Moses’ Rock.”
I made a note of this interesting name when i read the book 25 years ago, but a visit to Beamsley at that time found no obvious trace of the Moses Rock. It was only recently while looking through these old notes again that i finally got around to following up on this reference. There appears to be no mention of the Moses’ Rock in any other books or on maps, and another visit to Beamsley failed to locate it. The only person i saw there had never heard of the rock, and did not know of any wells in the village. After checking the maps again I decided to look at some of the springs outside the village, and one of these located on Lanshaw Bank Lane (just south of the village) would seem to be the Moses’ Rock spring noted by Harry Speight 120 years ago.
The spring flows from beneath a large rock at the foot of a steep bank, with a chamber built in front of the rock to collect the water and create the well. The chamber is around 60cm in depth, and extends under the rock for 50cm or more, where a metal bracket can be seen fastened to the rock at the back. This now hidden bracket might suggest that before the chamber was built the water originally flowed from a gap below the rock, and that a bucket could be hung on the bracket while it was filled from the spring.
This spring is actually marked on the old large scale OS maps as Goosehill Well, and the chamber with its ironwork point to it once being the village well. The chamber appears to have also had a lid in the past, and this suggests that it later became a reservoir tank to hold the water, which was then piped under the adjacent field to a tap in the village. It seems that after the mains water supply was brought to Beamsley, the ‘Moses Rock’ well fell out of use and eventually became forgotten.
Although officially called Goosehill Well, the water flowing from beneath a large rock must have reminded the villagers of the biblical story of Moses’ Rock. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt they eventually came to a barren place called Meribah, but the people became angry and complained to Moses that there was no water for themselves or their livestock. Moses asked for God’s help, and was told to call all the people together at a large rock, and to strike it with his staff. Moses did this, and water began to flow from the rock – enough for the people and their animals. Ironically, Moses was punished by God for striking the rock twice instead of speaking to it to ask for the waters to flow.
Reference
Speight, H. (1900) Higher Wharfedale.
Visscher, N. (1659) – Toneel ofte vertooch der bybelsche historien (Bible History scenes)
https://books.google.com/books?id=ex9cV_wzgTgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_at
